Thealogical Lady: A Blog

How does it feel?

6/10/2017

I shared the ordo of my Strawberry Moon Thean Eucharist at a friend's request, and he asked me afterward how it felt during and after that liturgy.

For a bit of background, allow me to say that my Thean Eucharist has evolved a great deal over the last two and a half years, so much so that we stopped doing Eucharist for a while because my thealogy had changed so much from its Christian roots.

But this was the response I offered my friend, and I believe it sums up what I value most about Theanism:

Our only light was what remained outside (which wasn't much) and the lone candle that we lit. The lighting of the candle hushed them. Nearly everything I did from that point forward brought forth a torrent of questions, mostly from A. M couldn't participate as well as A could with the parts involving reading. Both of those things left me with a little frustration. That being said, I felt this extraordinary calm and joy as we moved through the liturgy. It was so familiar and yet so fresh. It felt a bit like being at a wedding, or a funeral, or a baptism--it was rich with meaning and charged with the shaping of identity. It felt important and weighty, and I felt alive and at home right where I was, doing what I was doing, sharing and helping shape the story of me and my girls with them. It was as poignant as any liturgy at my old parish back home, and even more poignant than Thean Evening Prayer has been. Perhaps that was the case because my daughters were at the center of it and I could see them, or at least A, making connections and sorting out what it means to be of Thea and to regard all the rest of the world, including those we find difficult to love, as part of Thea.

Making connections between the narrative one hears and one's role in it, and to tell a narrative that empowers a person to shine in ways she never realized she could, is what it's all about for me. To be able to do this with others--particularly my own daughters--to observe them making those connections, and to watch them practice their unique power by being agents in the liturgy we share, is about as near to ecstasy as I've come.

The practice of engaging in liturgy with my girls feels like one of the most important tasks I could ever undertake, because this liturgy as I've shaped it encompasses what I value (and want to pass on to them) most. I want them to break bread with others. I want them to pray, whether that prayer centers them or gives them something to argue with, or both. I want them to be confident storytellers, and I want them to know they have the right to shape the stories they tell. I want them to know the extraordinary relationship between light and shadow without glorifying one over the other. I want them to know that they are, as much as any other part or person of the world, of Thea, of the stars, of the glory of this beautiful universe.

I loved it. ♥

Praying with the Thean Book of Psalms

8/24/2016

This morning, my older daughter and I cleared our dining room table. I invited her to bring out my lidded white candle and my sparkling, pale purple quartz. "What are you doing?" she asked as I opened the lid of the candle. I said nothing, setting the lid next to the candle, placing the quartz chunk inside it, and lighting the candle with a match. I opened my Thean Psalter to the section marked "Twenty-fourth Day: Morning Prayer." I asked my daughter if she was ready, and she said yes. I proceeded to pray the appointed psalms, 116-118, in a lively, lilting voice, making eye contact with her and slowing my words at important phrases. At the end of the final psalm, I said, "Amen," and she repeated it after me. I invited her to blow out the candle, and we collapsed in giggles as she blew and blew at the flame, to no avail. Thean light is not easily extinguished, she discovered.

After I walked my older daughter to school and drove my husband to work, my younger daughter and I met with a friend of mine who's heading off for rabbinical studies this fall. She wanted a copy of the print version of the Thean Psalter. As soon as I gave it to her, she began adding thin plastic tabs to it; she also oohed and aahed over the purple cardstock title page, the color of which was her favorite. Her excitement as she explored the Psalter's words mirrored my own, and I couldn't help grinning as I watched her. She asked which of the psalms were my favorites, and I pointed out Psalm 23, which reimagines the relationship between G-d and psalmist, moving from shepherd/sheep to mutually curious, passionate lovers who are, among other things, equals.

This Psalter represents Thean thealogical thought, which is feminist and feminine, egalitarian, pacifist, and creation-centric. Patriarchal structures/images as well as themes of violence and vengeance are challenged, eliminated, or transformed.

The e-copy of this finalized Thean Psalter is available for free to all who request it. The hard copy, which is laser-printed on high quality white paper and purple cardstock and comb-bound with a black spine in clear plastic front and back covers, is available for $10USD, payable via PayPal, with free shipping anywhere in the continental United States. I plan to make hard copies of the Thean Psalter available each first Saturday of the month at Thean Evening Prayer, where all who identify as women are welcome to pray.

Who is an icon of you?

6/2/2016

In my prayers today, I came across Psalm 15, which asks an important question:

Psalm 15

Thea, who is an icon of you?
   Who reveals your holy Body?

Each of us—whether blameless or guilty,
   whether she speaks the truth from her heart or deceives;

Whether there is guile upon her tongue;
whether she offers evil or kindness to her friend;
   whether she heaps generosity or contempt upon her neighbor;

Whether she has sworn to do no wrong
   or makes a vow and then takes back her word.

We are, each of us, icons of you,
because we are your living Body, broken, holy, and ever healing.

What a marvel, that you should knit us together in your love,
   sustaining us for love’s sake alone.

Blessed be Thea, our author and our sacred self,
   now and forever. Amen, amen.

The Creation Song by Shiloh Sophia McCloud / www.shilohsophiastudios.com

Living Lent: Psalm 68

2/14/2016

One of my goals in rewriting the psalter is to diminish the culture of vengeance that permeates it. In this spirit, I have rewritten Psalm 68.

Psalm 68

Let all Creatures be glad and rejoice before Goddess;
   let them also be merry and joyful.

Sing to Goddess, sing praises to her Name;
exalt her who rides upon the oceans;
   Thea is her Name, rejoice before her!

Mother of orphans, defender of widows,
   Goddess in her holy habitation!

Goddess gives the solitary a home
   and brings forth prisoners into freedom.

You sent a gracious rain, O Goddess, upon your inheritance;
   you refreshed the land when it was weary.

Your Creatures found their home in it;
   in your goodness, O Goddess, you have made provision for the poor.

Though you lingered among the sheepfolds,
   you shall be like a dove whose wings are covered with silver,
   whose feathers are like green gold.

You have gone up on high and led captivity captive;
you have received gifts even from all your Creatures,
   that the Lady Goddess might dwell among them.

Blessed be Thea day by day,
   the Goddess of our salvation, who bears our burdens.

She is our Goddess, the Goddess of our salvation;
   Goddess is the Lady, by whom we escape death.

They see your procession, O Goddess,
   your procession into the sanctuary, my Goddess and my Queen.

The singers go before, musicians follow after,
   in the midst of maidens playing upon the hand-drums.

Bless Goddess in the gathering;
   bless Thea, you that are of the fountain of Creation.

Send forth your strength, O Goddess;
   establish, O Goddess, what you have wrought for us.

Queens shall bring gifts to you,
   for your temple’s sake.

Sing to Goddess, O queendoms of the earth;
   sing praises to Thea.

She rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens;
   she sends forth her voice, her mighty voice.

Ascribe power to Goddess;
   her majesty is through Creation;
   her strength is in the skies and the earth.

How wonderful is Goddess in her holy places!
   the Goddess of Creation giving strength and power to her Creatures!
   Blessed be Goddess!

Thean Prayer Book

1/29/2016

I began using my Thean Prayer Book, both Psalter and Gospel, for the first time this morning. Praying it felt like going home at long last.

I read this from Psalm 139: "I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well." This is an affirmation of all creatures, and of this creature. Thea is imaginative; Thea is also my muse.

When I turned to my gospel, I read its dedication, which is written to my daughters. This gospel is designed for my daughters to learn from and be inspired by as they grow up. I imagine this gospel will develop in content as they develop in character.

I am so grateful to have a prayer resource that resonates with my thealogy--grateful, too, that I didn't turn back on creating it when I encountered resistance, explicit and implied, from mainstream religious people. I am thankful for my spiritual director, who, while mainstream in the religious sphere, is open to the unique moving of Holy Ruach in my life.

I feel as though I can finally live the religious life I was made for, free from the trappings of religious patriarchy. I am home.

If you would like a free electronic copy of my Thean Prayer Book, please e-mail me at lifeloveliturgy@gmail.com to request yours.

What I'm not teaching my daughters

10/15/2015

As I retranslate the Book of Psalms, I come across too many instances in which the psalmist writes something like this:

"Pour out your wrath upon the heathen who have not known you
and upon the the kingdoms that have not called upon your Name."
--Psalm 79

This usually comes after several lines of lament about how God has become angry at Israel and turned God's face away from them, so that their enemies overpower them. I'm nearly finished translating the Psalter, and I'm shocked at how often lines like these come up. How did I pray the whole Psalter every month when I was a Benedictine Canon (Novice)? How did I let such vengeful words pass my lips?

I suspect the rote character of reciting the psalms daily, combined with the daunting task of chanting the psalm tones correctly, dampened the impact of the words I was praying. In other words, I didn't know what I was praying. Now that I approach these words again, psalm by psalm, line by line, I can no longer gloss over them like I once did. I feel compelled to leave them out altogether. I don't want my daughters to learn that, if things are going badly for them, a) God is mad at them, or b) they have a right to wish God's wrath on someone else. Both of those ideas are completely backwards according to my thealogy.

I'm struggling as I finish this translation to remain true to the text when there's so much that I find thealogically problematic. There are many beautiful, transformative lines in the psalms, like "Create in me a clean heart, O God" (Psalm 51). There are many lines of praise to God, and gratitude for the wonders of creation, the work of God's hands. Those lines are lines that I will teach my daughters to memorize. I may even keep some of the lines that ask God why she has turned her face away, because it's a very human thing to search for reasons for the bad things that happen to us. When things are truly awful, it's natural for one to question God about why it's happened. But I will not teach my daughters to believe that God is wrathful, much less that God takes out her wrath on people when she loses her temper. My Goddess doesn't work like that. My Goddess is a Goddess of mercy, love, and tender care.

I feel a loss as I continue my work on the Psalter--elements of my childhood faith that I accepted without question are now no longer acceptable to me, and I'm having to let them go. I'm even having to rethink the Exodus, because I can't attribute the plagues to God's will. The Judeo-Christian pillars of my faith are failing, and I'm having to reimagine Goddess from the ground up.

Despite my losses, I trust that this book of prayer I'm creating is also revealing Goddess to me, one line at a time.

Presiding like a woman

8/22/2015

This is how we do it:

In kitchens, standing over steaming saucepans, following recipes
passed down by our grandmothers,
At the table, gathering the day’s news from children, guests,
lighting candles, feeding tidbits to the cats.
In operating theatres, administering with precision the deadly wounds that will heal,
In parliamentary communities and city councils,
trying to find another way of doing business.
wielding power that enables and includes,
In concert halls, at the rostrum, bringing all that unruly creativity
into one living, breathing music.
In classrooms, warming to our subject, encouraging the slow and
quick-witted learners, drawing out incipient wisdom.
In gardens, clearing weeds, making space for things to grow,
planning colours in their right times and seasons.
In bedrooms and at waterpools, learning over the women about to give
birth.
holding their sweating hands, looking into their eyes, saying
‘Yes! Now! Push!’
In our own voices – elegant, educated: rough, untamed; stuttering or eloquent;
in all the languages that God gives.
Or sometimes without voice, silently, through gestures;
the nod of the head, lifting of an arm, sway of our bodies,
the way we move around a space.
Sometimes with permission, mostly without.
Recognized for the priests that we are, mostly not.
Never alone; always in the company of sisters,
brothers, children, animals who call our gifts into being
and offer their own for the making of something
that includes everyone and yet is beyond us all.

Seated, standing, lying propped up in beds or couches,
from wheelchairs and walking frames.
proud of our bodies, bent with the burdens we’ve carried all these years
or youthful, resilient, reaching after what’s yet to come.

In shanty towns, under rickety roofs made out of tarpaulin.
and high rise council flats in the centre of sprawling cities.
In remote rural monasteries and out of the way retreat centres;
in hospitals, prisons and shopping centres.
factories, office blocks and parliamentary corridors;
in women’s refuges and hostels for the homeless.
old people’s homes and kids nurseries,
on death row and in the birthing wards:
every place where human lives jostle, mingle, struggle, despair, survive.
In the desert cave and the hermit’s hidden cleft,
where land and sky and the company of saints are the congregation.

This is how we do it:
not really thinking how we do it but doing it;
not naming it for what it is but sometimes, in flashes,
recognizing the nature of what it is we do:

the calling, the gathering, the creating of community,
the naming, the celebrating and lamenting of a people’s sorrows and joys.
the taking of what human hands have made.
offering it with thanksgiving and blessing.
the breaking, the fracturing of so many hopes and expectations.
to discover something unlooked for, new, beyond the brokenness:
the sharing of what has been given by others:
the discovering that, even out of little, hungers are fed,
hurts healed, wounds not taken away but transfigured –
the bearing, the manifesting of the body of God,
the carrying in our bodies of the marks of the risen One;
seeing the light reflected in each others’ eyes.
seeing Her beauty mirrored in each one’s softened face.

-Nicola Slee

I finished the first draft of my first novel yesterday. Upon finishing, I read and savored the above poem on an acquaintance's Facebook page.

As I look for my next project (and there are so many from which to choose!), I reflect on the difficulty of presiding. I have a whole liturgical library of resources to draw from, but none of those resources is Thean. I don't have a Thean prayer book, a Thean lectionary, a Thean Psalter, a Thean Bible, or a Thean hymnal. I long to have resources I can use that I don't have to create on a weekly basis, and in which I'm not constantly crossing out masculine pronouns and names and writing in feminine ones.

Presiding in this new liturgical tradition is my calling, but Thea never implied that it would be easy. The project that stirs my heart most now is the creation of permanent resources for the Thean tradition.

I could do this the easy way and simply revise existing Christian and Jewish texts for my own purposes. I probably will do that with the New Testament--I'm still drawn to the Christian narrative. But to have a prayer book that covers the whole liturgical year, I will have to reimagine the liturgical year in my own words. It won't be easy. But again, Thea never implied that it would be.

I want to do this the right way. I want to be able to make Thean resources available to others--and that's not something I can do if I'm piggybacking off someone else's work. So I will, prayer by prayer, create new resources for Theanism. And, perhaps within the space of a few months, or a year, or a decade, I will have Thean books I can turn to when I preside over my house church liturgies.

Mother God

7/22/2015

I have a thurible at home that's made of wood. It has eight sides and a spire leading to a point at the top. Dozens of holes are carved in the wood to make way for the smoke of lit incense.

My older daughter picked up my thurible today and asked me what it was for--it's not something we use very often for our home liturgies. I told her it was for incense, and she asked me what incense was. I told her that incense made a nice smell. She asked if we could smell the incense. So I went to the cupboard, pulled out matches, charcoal, and incense, and readied the thurible.

When the sweet-smelling smoke began to rise, she asked if we could pray. I pulled her into my lap and asked her who we should pray for. The usual litany of names began. When she had run out of names, she jumped off the bed, gathered up all our liturgy books, and placed them side by side on the bedspread. "Let's read about Mother God," she said, so we picked up Heart Talks with Mother God and read about God as mother eagle (Deuteronomy 32:11).

I am grateful that my daughters are able to imagine God in the feminine. Thea is their name for her. I never imagined myself rearing Theans, nor did I imagine myself self-identifying as a Thean, but here I am--here we are--making our way in the midst of the enveloping and awe-inspiring divine feminine.

Drama

4/30/2015

Occasionally my four-year-old and I will do dramatic improvisations of biblical characters. For example, the other day, she said, "You be Jesus," so I played Jesus, first carrying the cross, then laying down on the cross, then being nailed to the cross (by her), then dying. Then my almost two-year-old tapped on my arm to raise me from the dead: I was resurrected.

It wasn't long before my four-year-old wanted to switch roles. She was to play Jesus and I was to play Mary Magdalene, she said. Suddenly we were outside the tomb, the rock was rolled away, and Jesus was calling my name, asking me why I was there. Then we switched roles again so she could play Mary Magdalene and wear a sparkling scarf on her head.

Bit by bit, my daughter, who loves both reading and performing, is learning the stories of the Bible. She's also learning, through our house church liturgies, that God's name is Thea, and that "she" is an appropriate pronoun for the divine. What will my biblically literate, feminist daughter make of her faith as she grows up? Where will the path she's on now lead her later in life? I watch her and see potential for wonderful things. No matter how she chooses to journey in the future, I suspect her adult faith life will be rich indeed.

119

4/29/2015

Thea,
help me discern the time for ending
and the time for beginning anew.
Amen.

118

4/28/2015

Thea,
I rejoice today in the rescuing of 293 women and girls from the clutches of Boko Haram. May all slaves be set free, and may their hearts rejoice with freedom's song.
Amen.

117

4/27/2015

Thea,
if you will it, grant me the grace to write in such a way
that hearts stir and break free of their bonds at my words.
Amen.

116

4/26/2015

Thea,
give me the wisdom to love the questions
when what I seek is an answer.
Amen.

114

4/24/2015

Thea,
when my hands tremble,
steady them;
when my heart races,
urge it to slow to a walking pace.
Amen.

115

4/23/2015

Thea,
rouse your mighty spirit
and stir the still waters within me
until my heart is a storm,
wild with torrents of your love.
Amen.

113

4/23/2015

Thea,
as I hold out my empty hands to you,
fill them with confidence,
that I may become as limitless as you are.
Amen.

112

4/22/2015

Thea,
all of creation sings of your wonders
and I am caught up in its song whenever I stop to ponder the earth.
Teach human creatures to love and care well for creatures of all kinds.
Amen.

111

4/21/2015

Thea,
I overheard the table conversation of some followers of the Way.
One said to the other, "All paths lead to God."
The other replied, "None come to the Father except through Jesus."
I bit my tongue, and wondered if I should share the good news of you.
In the end I remained silent, knowing that's what I would want if the tables were turned.
Give me the grace to love the hearts of those who believe only-through-Jesus,
and give me the grace to love the many paths that lead to you.
Amen.

110

4/20/2015

Thea,
teach tiny arms to nestle in big arms,
a sure place of refuge.
Amen.

109

4/19/2015

Thea,
for three weeks I've swum the choppy waters of writing,
and several times I've nearly drowned.
Each time, my endurance has emerged as victor.
Grant me the inspiration to continue this swim to the end,
even though my muscles are fatigued and I yearn to rest.
Amen.